jurassic night at scitech

There is a nice science museum at Khobar Corniche. Like most important landmarks in the Kingdom, it's named after a royal figure: Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Science and Technology Center (aka Scitech). The 35,000 square ft. facility is a nice, modern building housing an IMAX theatre and a number of galleries. Currently it's hosting an exhibition on dinosaurs, so I took the kids for a visit last evening. They were thrilled to see the big moving and roaring monsters and the replica of a T. Rex skeleton. The permanent exhibits were also interesting, most of them interactive with bilingual explanations and descriptions. My younger son, the more adventurous of the two, and I posed with a live snake, about a meter-and-a-half long, for a photograph. It's a nice place to spend an evening with the family. The gift shop and cafeteria were disappointing, though.

A bonus attraction last night was a street performance in front of the Museum by a Saudi dance troupe.

mind your language

The official medium of instruction at our university is Arabic, though the use of English is encouraged. I have no figures, but my guess is around half the faculty are Saudis. Among the non-Saudis, most are Egyptians and there are some Syrians as well. We belong to a tiny minority who are linguistically handicapped. We use English in the class room. The students endure us with blank faces (well, some of them, if not most). A senior South Asian colleague advised me not to take any exams in the graduate course that I have been assigned, because he’s afraid the entire class would fail. He suggested awarding grades based on assignments instead.

But assignments they submit are often little more than a collage of cut-and-pasted documents. Another colleague told me that he once found a term paper liberally sprinkled with chunks of German passages. The student didn’t even notice the language of the document he was copying from.

Yet another colleague once tested the students by switching to his native tongue (not English or Arabic) in the middle of a lecture. There was no reaction among the students.

Saudi Arabia is probably the only place in the world where university professors deliver three-hour lectures to classrooms packed with attentive furniture. Education here is not coeducational, and within the same university, there are separate facilities for girl students. If the instructor is male, the girl students sit behind a screen, out of his sight. The girls are smart enough and often quietly slip out of class instead of sitting through three hours of gibberish